


Blood In The Shoe

by irrelevanttous



Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Crimes & Criminals, F/M, Human!Alice, Murder Mystery, Vampire!Jasper
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:42:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28173366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevanttous/pseuds/irrelevanttous
Summary: 1919.Edgar Brandon was murdered and his eldest daughter is the prime suspect of the investigation. The detective in charge, Jasper Whitlock, vows to do whatever it takes to solve the crime. The stakes are unbearably high. But is Mary-Alice Brandon really the murderer?
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	Blood In The Shoe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beautlilies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautlilies/gifts), [tragicallywicked](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tragicallywicked/gifts).



> Have I really started another story instead of finishing my WIPs? Yep. But, the good news is: This story is already finished, I wrote it in a little over two weeks. I hope you guys like it, this is one of my favourite genres. 
> 
> Big thanks to @tragicallywicked and @beautlilies for reading over this and letting me know your thoughts and for beta-reading. I love you guys, your encouragement gives me life.

# _____________

**_Blood In The Shoe_ **

# _____________

# ACT I

_**Chapter 1** _

**A Grave Covered in Snow**

********

____________________________________________________________________________________

_„When the winter came, the snow covered the grave with a white covering, and when the sun came in the early spring and melted it away, the man took to himself another wife.“_

____________________________________________________________________________________

********

**1919**

“Oh, it’s a right mess, you’d better believe me,” Peter greeted him as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the old city house, the ancient floorboards creaking underneath his leather boots. “From the looks of it, the man’s throat was cut, though we haven’t figured out yet how the bastard did it.”

“Who was in the house when it happened?”

“Just the two daughters. The wife was out, at a friend’s place, the staff had already left for the day.”

“Did you have the friend confirm the wife’s whereabouts?”

“’Course, I did, ‘lock’.” Peter, for one small moment, frowned at his partner with discontent, “The friend confirmed her alibi.” 

Jasper Whitlock sighed and gave a short nod. He’d taken off his hat when he’d entered the house and ran his fingers through his honey-blond curls now—an old habit. “Where is the body?”

“In the living area.”

“Show me.” 

Peter led him through the hallway of the house, careful to avoid the many police officers who were swarming around, searching for evidence. Jasper frowned, just as Peter had just moments ago: The clumsy officers were not considerate enough, stomping around the house like the literal bull in a china shop, potentially ruining any piece of evidence that could be found lying around here. Dissatisfied, he turned to Peter again, “Why did you not close off the crime scene? I told you to, didn’t I?”

Again, there was a hint of annoyance in Peter’s features. “I did. These officers were the first responders at the scene. They secured the initial evidence—not that there was much – and interviewed the witnesses.”

Jasper stared at him. “Witnesses? I thought nobody saw what happened? And why didn’t they wait for us?”

“Well, some neighbours saw a suspicious man walking down the street around the time when the murder likely happened. We haven’t identified him yet, but the others at the station are already working on it. And the daughters heard a struggle and a scream late last night, coming from downstairs. They didn’t see anything, but–” 

“Stop,” Jasper said. “I don’t want to hear their words out of your mouth. I will speak to them myself, form my own opinion. You mentioned evidence. What have we got?”

Peter shrugged. “Like I said: not much. No murder weapon, no footprints, no fingerprints. They only found a receipt from a shop in London, but the victim might have had that on him while he died. Nothing points toward it belonging to the killer at this point.”

“London?” Jasper pressed his back against the wall while he let one of the police officers squeeze past him in the narrow corridor. “Did the victim have any connections to London?”

“We’re on it, Steve sent a telegram. The man served in the war overseas, so he might’ve.”

“All right.” Overall—in spite of the clumsiness of the police officers roaming about the place—this didn’t strike him as an unsolvable case. Jasper would know more as soon as he could see the body and talk to the witnesses, but he felt encouraged already. Earlier at the station, Charlotte had made it seem like some kind of indecipherable murder mystery, and he wasn’t quite sure how she’d got the idea. 

He walked in Peter’s footsteps as he followed the other man into the living area, careful not to wipe out any possible evidence on the dark grey carpet floor. Mentally, he’d already started making notes of the place as soon as he’d walked through the door. The expensive-looking paintings on the wall as well as the high-quality carpentry in the living area made it obvious that the family was wealthy. And yet, Jasper—who had lived in town for nearly five years now—had not read, nor heard their name before, so they likely didn’t socialize in the elite circles of town society, the ones who made it into the papers. Depending on the outcome of today’s investigation, he considered it an option to go through the local newspaper archive to find more information about the family and their legacy, but he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. 

When he and his partner stepped into the living room of the townhouse, the first thing he noticed was the distinct smell hanging in the air. The room smelled… clean. Too clean. Peter didn’t seem to notice it, but then again, he was not blessed with the same supernatural gifts Jasper possessed, so it didn’t surprise him too much. 

The other thing he immediately noticed upon his entry to the room were the two girls who were standing at the side of the room, next to a large set of windows, their backs against the wall and their expressions terrified. The daughters of the victim, as Jasper quietly noted in his mind. For a short moment, he felt his previous irritation flare up again and he shot Peter a look which clearly stated: _Why are they still here? Why didn’t you remove them from the scene_?

It was unfathomable to him that the police officers had made the daughters of the victim wait in _here_ for him to arrive. Not just the blood all over the floor, staining the carpet in a deep, dark red colour, indicated that this was the scene of a murder. Then there was also the unnatural position in which the body had fallen to the ground, the man’s limbs twisted in a grotesque way. It was an unpleasant sight even for _him_ , so he didn’t want to imagine the girls’ horror at the scene.

Jasper had seen many dead bodies over the course of his still short career in the police force, but something about this murder seemed particularly gruesome, and he felt a slight shiver creep through his bones. Perhaps it was due to the fact that he couldn’t smell anything other than the scent of the cleaning product hanging in the air. Because after all, why would anybody bother cleaning a room where somebody had died if not to hide their identity—the identity of the murderer? By now there was no doubt in his mind that this was, in fact, a murder.

“Get them out of here,” Jasper said to Peter, only throwing a short side-glance at the daughters of the victim. Normally, he would have gone over to them first and told them he was sorry for their loss, but the crime scene had likely already been tampered with, and his first impressions were usually the most important ones, so he could waste no time before getting on with his inspection. There would be time to interview the witnesses afterwards.

Peter crossed the room and spoke to the girls in a low, quiet voice so as not to distract Jasper. Not that it was necessary: The young detective wasn’t paying any attention to the other people in the room anymore, too focused on the crime scene to notice his surroundings. 

As soon as Peter and the girls had left the room, Jasper crouched down next to the distorted body, acting with great care: he could not touch anything, had wanted to leave the room in exactly the same state as it had been directly after the murders. Again, he sniffed the air around him and tried to determine whether other smells had been consciously masked by someone with the help of the detergent. Unfortunately, not even his superior senses could filter out the smell of any other person. The only people he could smell in the air were the family members and some police officers, although he couldn’t rule out for certain the possibility of an outside intruder. He simply didn’t know, and it was an unusual, uncomfortable feeling. 

When he’d stepped into the room, there had just been one smell he didn’t recognise, distinctively female, but he assumed it likely belonged to the wife of the victim whom he hadn’t met yet. The woman was sitting in the kitchen right at this moment—which was a fair distance away from the living area—so he couldn’t be sure if the smell here matched hers, but it seemed to have the same nuisance, so he didn’t spend too much time thinking about this particular mental thread. 

The smell and sight of the blood all over the floor didn’t bother him as much as it did on most days. Today, he wasn’t thirsty, after having drunk half a gallon of blood just yesterday in the city morgue. His eyes were still black; they had always been black since he first woke, since he’d opened his eyes to this new existence for the first time. Somehow, Jasper knew they would turn red should he ever kill a human, but so far that hadn’t happened, and he wasn’t willing to ever let it get that far. In the past, he’d never allowed himself to get too thirsty, had always made sure to drink regularly. 

When he examined the body, it became clear to him that whoever had killed the victim must have surprised the man. His dead, glassy eyes were staring ahead in shock—a terrifying sight—and his petrified mouth hung wide open. Of this and many other things, Jasper took note within a few short seconds. One other thing he realised quickly was that the first responders had estimated the wrong time frame for the crime. On the way here, he had been informed that the murder had taken place around 1 am last night, but from the stain on the carpet and the state of the blood clotting, he concluded that the crime must have occurred much later, perhaps around 3 am. 

The wound itself was sloppy, not a clean cut, so the attacker had likely not used a knife or a similarly sharp-edged object to inflict the mortal injury. It bothered Jasper that he couldn’t tell what the murder weapon had been. In other cases, it had taken him only a few seconds of examining the body—with the help of his supernatural sight—to figure it out. 

He stayed in the living area for ten more minutes and looked at the body from all angles, saving everything he saw in his memory. Knowing that his memory was far more reliable than the crime scene pictures the police photographer had taken, Jasper decided to go over everything again once he’d spoken to the witnesses. 

Gesturing at the coroners to enter the room, he made his way to the door through which Peter and the daughters had disappeared a while ago. He let his senses guide him to the kitchen, never once setting foot in the wrong room or corridor. Once again, he thought about the many advantages of being a vampire in this job. 

When he reached the kitchen and entered it, he saw the two girls standing next to the fireplace in some distance from each other. In the middle of the room, a relatively young woman sat at the table, her legs crossed and her expression grim. He mentally compared her age to the victim’s and came to the conclusion that she was a lot younger than him.

On the other side of the kitchen, Peter was leaning casually against one of the cupboards. He was staring down at a piece of paper he was holding, a deep frown displayed on his forehead. Jasper wondered briefly what the document might be, before focusing on the task at hand again.

He crossed the room with quick steps and extended his hand toward the woman sitting at the table. She rose from her seat and took his hand, giving it a surprisingly firm shake.

“Anna-Marie Brandon,” she said.

“Jasper Whitlock,” Jasper replied politely. “You’re the wife?”

The woman dropped down onto the chair again as if she didn’t have the strength to stand any longer, and gave him a short nod. 

“Forgive me, ma’am, but I couldn’t help but notice the pictures in the hallway. They looked … different. Were they taken on your wedding day?”

“No.” Mrs Brandon shook her head. “That was my husband’s first wife. She passed away last year.”

Mentally, Jasper wrote down that information before returning his attention to her. “I’m so sorry for your loss. My partner tells me you weren’t here last night?”

“No, I was at a friend’s house. She’s seven months pregnant and hasn’t been feeling well lately, so she asked me to stay over. Her husband died in the war.” Anna-Marie’s tone was quiet, but with an undertone he couldn’t decipher, and Jasper used his gift to test her emotions. When he did, he nearly flinched at the intensity of them. Her mind was full of bottomless grief and furious rage, an admittedly understandable mix given the circumstances. Considering that her husband had just been murdered.

He shook his head slightly to recover from the brief shock and glanced at Peter. “Could you set up the room next-door for me? I would like to talk to the family members separately. And bring those neighbours we’ve talked about in here.”

Without delay, Peter followed his orders and Jasper began the interviews of the witnesses. The first person he talked to was the grieving widow herself, who had—due to her absence from the house last night—not seen or heard anything of use. He asked about her relationship with her husband in general, possible connections or enemies he might have had, and his life’s history, but the woman couldn’t give him any useful information. After half an hour, he decided he’d heard everything he needed to know from her at this point in time.

The next person Peter brought in was an elderly woman, the next-door neighbour. She told him in great detail about a man she’d seen outside the house in the middle of the night when she’d been roused from her sleep by the sounds of two street dogs fighting. Jasper wrote down this information and her description of the man, although it wouldn’t have been necessary. His supernatural memory was far superior to any notepad in the world. The truth was, he only wrote something down for the sake of appearances. Peter—or any of the other police officers or witnesses—would be suspicious if Jasper just appeared to be able to remember everything in the smallest and finest details without taking visual notes. Humans were incapable of that.

After he was done interrogating the neighbour, Jasper asked Peter to bring in one of the girls. There was a short delay, then a small knock on the door startled him from his thoughts. The door swung open and the older daughter entered the room. The first thing he noticed was how short she was, barely tall enough to reach up to his chest. Her hair was of a deep, raven colour and fell down her back in small, soft waves. She was still dressed in her nightgown, clearly having been in too much shock after the events of the night to change into something more proper. He looked her up and down and noticed a barely visible red stain on the hem of the gown. He narrowed his eyes slightly and brought his gaze back to her face. The girl looked at him from frightened, brown eyes and pressed her back against the wall on the opposite side of the room. As far away from him as possible.

“Please, come in and sit down. I want to ask you a few questions,” he said in a hopefully non-threatening way. When he reached out with his gift to test her emotions, he was taken aback by the force of her anxiety. It was virtually exploding out of her, like ash from a volcano. The girl was utterly terrified. Of what, he couldn’t say. Instinctively, he sent calming waves of reassurance her way and could see how she straightened her back a little while she carefully walked over to the chair Peter had placed in the middle of the room. He could hear her heart pounding rapidly inside her chest.

Jasper stood from his own position and walked over to the window, glancing outside. He had a feeling this girl would be more likely to tell him what she knew if he didn’t interrogate her eye to eye. 

“You were here last night, with your sister. Is that right?”

When he didn’t hear an answer, he turned around to face her again and saw that the girl gave a small nod, avoiding his eyes. 

“Can you tell me what you saw?” he asked, although he knew that she quite possibly hadn’t seen _anything_.

She stared straight ahead at a portrait next to his head and didn’t say a word. Jasper followed the direction of her gaze and looked at the picture that seemed to have caught her attention but couldn’t find anything of interest. He turned his head again. “All right. Let’s start differently. What is your name?”

He normally liked to jump right into the interesting questions, but he had a feeling he would not succeed with this tactic when it came to this girl.

She mumbled something under her breath that even Jasper—with his superior hearing—couldn’t make out. “What was that?”

The girl looked at him for what seemed to be the first time since she’d entered the room, and repeated, louder this time, “Mary-Alice Brandon.”

“Very well, Mary-Alice. Can I call you Mary-Alice? How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

Jasper frowned at that. He hadn’t expected her to be an adult: She looked so young. Probably due to her height. But now that he considered it, her features were far too mature to belong to a younger girl, and the way she carried herself was dignified despite her fear, so he supposed it made sense. She was only one year younger than him—at least, when one considered the age his _body_ would forever be stuck in—and it surprised him.

“You’re Edgar Brandon’s daughter? From his first marriage, I’m assuming?” Jasper continued. Those questions were just to warm her up a little, to get her used to volunteering information about herself.

“Yes,” she said, still not meeting his eyes. He could feel her anxiety mount up again, up to a point where he himself felt like barging out of the room, screaming. He increased the frequency of the calming emotions and heard her exhale deeply for the first time.

“What happened to your mother?” It was a risky question, and he was jumping straight back into the investigation.

Mary-Alice gasped at his words, her upper body jolting upright. Her eyes flew to the door, then the window. Jasper didn’t miss a single detail of her reaction and mentally took notes of it. 

“She died,” was all she said when she regained control over herself.

“How?”

“An accident.”

“What type of accident?”

She didn’t reply and Jasper stepped back from the window and crossed the room. Then he sat across from her on the other chair. 

“Mary-Alice?”

The girl stared at the same spot on the wall, her eyes unblinking. After a long moment, she finally replied, still in the same, quiet voice, “A fishing accident. She drowned.”

“I’m sorry about that.” For once, he wasn’t lying. Now that her father was gone, she was an orphan. Just like him. 

There was a somewhat mocking expression in her eyes for the fraction of a second before she collected herself again. “Are you?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“ _Are_ you sorry? Really?” she said, her voice bitter. “Because honestly, I don’t buy it. I’m sure you say this to many people on a daily basis, but deep down, aren’t you just excited about the prospect of solving another murder? This is your job, don’t act as if you care about the people who are left behind.”

Jasper was speechless for a moment and felt his jaw dropping wide open. He’d never expected her—or anybody—to talk to him like that. “Of course I care. That’s the reason I’m doing this job, to help the family members of the victims to get closure.”

Mary-Alice snorted at those words. “If you say so.”

She’d completely unsettled him, and Jasper struggled to regain his composure, searching his mind for the point of the interrogation where he’d left off earlier. He cleared his throat. “Tell me what you saw—or heard—last night. In fact, tell me everything that happened since you ate dinner yesterday evening.”

Mary-Alice clearly felt very uncomfortable in his presence, so her words came out slowly and forced, but she still told him about their father sending them to bed at their usual bedtime, her stepmother leaving to go to her friend’s house, and her sister not being able to sleep, crying in her bed. Then, at night-time, Mary-Alice had been woken by a scream and the sound of furniture being moved around, as well as glass—or similar fragile objects—breaking. 

“When was that?” Jasper asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“Did you go and check what caused the noises?”

“I didn’t.”

“Why not?” 

“Because my father was a drunk,” Mary-Alice said, her voice cold all of a sudden. “It wasn’t rare that he would stumble and fall in the middle of the night in a haze, screaming. And it was always better to stay away from him whenever he was in that state.”

Jasper frowned. “Has your father ever shown … violent tendencies?”

He could feel her fear skyrocketing again and felt like he had his answer even before she spoke. When she did, she shook her head. “No.” 

Jasper didn’t believe her for a single second but decided to not call her out for her lie. “Did your sister hear those noises from downstairs?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Internally, he sighed. “I will.” 

It was bothering him that she was so unwilling to cooperate and, in truth, it made the alarm bells go off inside his head. In the past, when someone had been so stubbornly refusing to answer his questions, the person had usually not only been the prime suspect of their investigation but also in many cases the guilty person they were looking for. Still, as he stared at his tiny young girl with a frown on his forehead, he couldn’t really imagine her as a cold-blooded murderer. 

But he needed to solve this case. Desperately. So, he decided to push further. “That red stain on your dressing gown … what is that?”

All colour drained from her face as she stared at him. Then she bent down her neck to gape at the mentioned stain. Her reaction troubled him. He already knew it was a bloodstain—his senses never failed him in these matters—so it had simply been a rhetorical, a trick question. Inside, he hoped she would come up with a logical explanation for the stain.

Mary-Alice gulped and looked back at him again, trying too hard to hold his gaze. “Paint.”

He inhaled deeply, despite not needing the oxygen in his lungs. “We both know that’s a lie.”

Before she could answer, a knock on the door interrupted their staring contest and Peter peeked inside the room. “Sorry to bother you, ‘lock, but the younger sister seems to be close to a mental breakdown, so it might be best if you talked to her first before she’s unresponsive or too upset to talk.”

Jasper nodded matter-of-factly. “Miss Brandon, we will resume this conversation at a later time.”

Mary-Alice rose from her seat but made no move to leave. “If my sister is feeling unwell, perhaps it’s for the best if you don’t speak with her rig–”

“It won’t take long,” Jasper said. And then, to Peter, he added, “Could you please bring in the younger Miss Brandon?”

When Peter did, Mary-Alice stayed rooted in the same spot, not moving an inch. Her younger sister looked very much like her, as Jasper immediately couldn’t help but notice when she stepped into the room, only perhaps ten or more years younger. When she passed her, Mary-Alice reached out to touch her sister’s shoulder, but the other girl pulled away jerkily and Mary-Alice recoiled as if she’d burned herself.

“Cyn–” she began, her eyes flickering nervously between the other girl and Jasper, but her sister cut her off.

“Stay away from me, witch.”

Jasper’s eyebrows shot up as he sensed not only Mary-Alice’s desperation and shock at those words but also her sister’s repugnance when she spoke them. For some reason unknown to him, the other girl seemed to genuinely _despise_ Mary-Alice. 

Mary-Alice cast him another glance, her eyes now full of tears and fear, desperate and primal, which could only be found in those who knew their life was forfeit. 

At that moment, Jasper became aware that, yes: It was very likely that she was indeed the one responsible for her father’s death.

**Author's Note:**

> Uhhh, a cliffhanger? You'd better get used to that...  
> Let me know your thoughts?


End file.
